Have you ever heard of Raye Montague? Like most people, I hadn’t either- not until I read her obituary. What she did was amazing. During the Vietnam War, the Navy spent 2 years unsuccessfully trying to create a computer program to design ships. Raye was charged with completing that task in 6 months. [She said Read the full article…
This week there were two notable demonstrations of men dismissing what women have to say. The first was a comment by David Bonderman, an Uber Director. The second was Senators McCain and Burr’s stopping Senator Kamala Harris from completing her questioning of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Bonderman’s misstep was responding to Uber Director Arianna Huffington’s Read the full article…
On February 23rd, I was one of about 300 participants at the first Women Transforming Technology conference. The keynote speakers were Arianna Huffington and Mary Lou Jepsen. My initial attraction to the event was the opportunity to see Arianna Huffington in person. As the opening speaker she was animated, entertaining, and touchingly personal in her comments. The Read the full article…
There’s an old saying: ‘the road to Hell is paved with good intentions’. I believe Mattel had good intentions when it published Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. It just did it completely wrong. Sadly, the players involved were all women. The author, Susan Marenco, “worked for Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen as a editor and Read the full article…
Dr. Laura Esserman, Director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center is a physician, researcher, and innovator who is changing the future of treatment for breast cancer. With her combination of brains, passion, tenacity, empathy and energy- she’s unstoppable. I originally met Laura through Jeff Pfeffer, Professor of Organization Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate Read the full article…
When I ask someone -who is Helen Greiner?- the response is usually a blank stare. Helen who? OK- have you heard of Roomba? Now that’s a familiar name. Well, Helen Greiner is the woman behind that invention. It is just one of the products produced by iRobot, the company she co-founded in 1990. Other household-friendly Read the full article…
When I challenge audiences to respond, they struggle a while and then usually respond with “Madame Curie”. In Silicon Valley, someone occasionally mentions Grace Hopper. And then- they get stuck. You have probably heard of Watson & Crick- who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the DNA molecule. But did you know that x-ray diffractions Read the full article…
In my last post, I referred to the macho nature of workaholism as a factor that increased the challenges faced by professional women. The increasing interest of men in spending quality time with their families is likely to bring the issue of work-life balance to the forefront. Businesses fear that having people working fewer hours Read the full article…
This year, around Father’s Day, there was a flurry of articles lately on the topic of work life balance (or lack thereof) for fathers. There were 3 basic themes: 1. Healthy interaction with fathers positively impacts the development of children. (Let’s hear it for fathers!; Fathers Play an Important Part in a Child’s Development) 2. Read the full article…
Having decided to really focus on helping build women’s confidence, I keep wandering back to the topic of women and innovation. Mind you, the two are related. One of the factors inhibiting women’s ability to innovate is lack of confidence and its cousin, fear of failure. In a previous post, I had written about Female Interaction, a Read the full article…